American health care is undergoing a revolution. By the year 2000, more than two-thirds of all American workers with health insurance will be enrolled in some kind of managed care plan, where the emphasis is on early detection of disease and preventive care.
Fueling this revolution is the skyrocketing cost of health care, combined with new medical research showing lifestyle is important to good health. In fact, in its 1982 report on “Health and Behavior,” the National Academy of Sciences concluded that half of the ten leading causes of death in the United States are primarily related to lifestyle. Dietary patterns are identified as key lifestyle choices.
Cholesterol levels are particularly important in the United States. For this reason, the American Heart Association, the American Medical Association and the health related agencies of the U.S. government have embarked on national education campaigns to inform the public about the importance of making lifestyle changes to lower blood cholesterol and prevent heart disease. Although the dangers of high cholesterol have been widely publicized, many people fail to make effective use of this information because they do not know their own blood cholesterol levels. In other words, a great many of the people with high cholesterol levels fail to heed the advice to lower their cholesterol levels simply because they are unaware of their own cholesterol levels.
This situation persists because of the high cost and inconvenience presently involved in obtaining cholesterol information. To obtain this information, most people go to a physician's office, have blood drawn, and wait for the return of the blood chemistry analysis. Often, obtaining the results involves a second trip to the physician's office. This is expensive and time consuming; the average cost is about $83 for each office cholesterol consultation, and the average wait for the results is several days.
The cost and inconvenience involved in obtaining cholesterol tests inhibits many people from testing their cholesterol frequently enough to provide effective positive feedback. As a result, many people who begin corrective exercise, diet, or drug therapy programs in response to high cholesterol tests often give up their corrective programs because they do not monitor their cholesterol frequently enough to remain aware of the benefits of their programs. Moreover, blood cholesterol numbers by themselves are often poor motivators for patients who feel and look fine, and do not immediately feel or look differently when they take their prescriptions. In fact, studies have shown that 80% of the patients prescribed cholesterol-lowering drug therapies stop taking their prescriptions within a few months. And the attrition rates for exercise and diet programs may be even higher.
In addition, there is a need for a medical records maintenance system, not only for blood cholesterol tests but for many types of medical information that can be obtained outside of the hospital environment. This need will increase with increases in the availability of remote health monitoring devices in the future, such as blood pressure measuring devices, blood sugar testing devices, blood cholesterol testing devices, AIDS testing devices, heart monitoring devices, sleep respiration monitoring devices, reproductive cycle and pregnancy monitoring devices, epileptic and other types of seizure monitoring devices, and a wide range of other remote health monitoring devices that may be developed in the future. As the availability of the remote health monitoring devices increases, users will have an increasing need for securely storing the tests results in electronic format. The current system of hard-copy and electronic medical records maintained in doctors' offices will become increasingly obsolete and inconvenient as the availability of electronically-stored medical data increases. Because a patient's medical records are highly confidential, there is a need for a highly secure and permanent medical records maintenance system under the control of individual patients and their doctors.
Thus, there is a general need in the art for a less expensive and more convenient approach to providing cholesterol tests. There is a further need for making motivational information regarding cholesterol levels more readily available and more effective. And there is yet another need for a highly secure and permanent medical records maintenance system under the control of individual patients and their doctors.